One of the few new success stories
Chaturbate has followed the lead of MyFreeCams
but taken it a step further, and in my opinion has really got something
right.

A very recent offering it only started operating in mid 2011 but has
generated fantastic growth both in overall traffic and in terms of usage.
Jump started by free cams and some major prizes in the early months it has
a cool combination of nice atmosphere, a professional feel, and smooth technology.

What interests me most is that they have taken whole concept of free-shows-for-tokens
which seemed to have been really perfected by MFC and have fine tuned it
by baking the process into the technology.

Each of the
free chat rooms has a section beneath the video where the hosts tips and
goals are clearly shown. By putting the goal up there in bold and
by highlighting who is giving tips, the host is relieved from some of need
to "work the room" that otherwise free-for-token shows need. Indeed
generally speaking the rooms on Chaturbate are free from begging, either
for flashes or for tokens, and so there is a happier atmosphere of fun.

Additional tweaks that have been implemented just in the last couple
months include optional disabling of emoticons in chat, some people hate
them, searching and filtering chatrooms geography, optionally spy-on-private,
easily resizable video windows and sorting nicks by tokens.

This constant fine tuning in response to customer demand, and in this
regard it is both the hosts and the viewers who are customers, has made
it a very friendly site to use. No struggling with clunky web interfaces,
everything makes sense and is easy to use and doesn't get in the way of
the party atmosphere.

Yes there is private chat as well, and you do sometimes see hosts go
into private, but as with MFC this is not really where the fun or the business
is happening. If you want to be old-style with privates then
imlive or camcontacts
are probably more your style.

Chaturbate makes no distinction between viewer, performer and indeed
webmaster, once you signup for a free account your are all of those things
and just choose which you want to do. Create your fee account with
username/password/email/birthday/gender. Notice that the e-mail
is actually optional, only required if you want to get notifications.

Tick the box for agreeing to T&C but watch out there is also a pre-ticked
box for "Also give me a free dating membership"
which means getting email promos from fling.com if you leave it checked.

This free signup gets you a "Basic account" which is actually plenty
to view cams and even broadcast yourself. Though you can't accept
payments including tips until you have submitted age verification documents.
(See "For Models" below to see how to sign up
as model and start your own show)

Either choose a chatroom from the thumbnails or set a filter first.
The filters are pretty basic with only geo selections like Asia, North America
etc. Only the Philippines is broken out as a separate country for
obvious reasons.

Once in a chat room the video and text load fast and you can easily adjust
for comfortable viewing. Most of you will want to immediately click
on the "contest" tab though to see who is doing best at the moment.
This is the hourly content for $10 for basically the most viewed room.

The best and most interesting chatrooms are always at the top, though
you'll see a few basic typical types which may or may not be to your liking.
Some are basically a free hardcore show. Others are all tease, often
clothed, perhaps jiggling to music or simply chatting. While a
few are waiting not doing much until they get their goal of tokens when
a show will start.

Whatever style the room is you can feel confident that if it is at the
top of the competition list it's going to be good. It typically doesn't
take more than a few clicks to go through the top few and find one to your
liking.

There is no shortage of hardcore both in the thumbnails and in the live
shows. So this is not a place for the shy viewer or for the host;
though that said there are a few hosts who do little more than remove their
shirt and still have fun and profitable rooms.

At that point of course you can settle down to watch, and participate,
and finally throw some tokens in.

Basic purchase is 100 tokens for $11 so around 10 cents a token.
It's cheaper if you buy in bulk (down to 8 cents a token) and there is a
"free" startup 200 tokens given once you hand over your CC details.

Credit Card billing is handled directly by Chaturbate, which is pretty
unusual, and means you are being charged by Dusktone Limited in the
UK which is the company that owns it.

Big spenders can use wire transfers to buy tokens at the cheapest rate
in bulk.

They really do want as many people to be broadcasting, and doing shows,
as they can. Hence the very prominent link for it at the top of their
chat page.

The bold "Broadcast yourself" option at the top of the page is right
beside the Chatroom link and encourages you to have a go. Will this
tempt regular viewers into trying to be hosts? Maybe, maybe not, but
the admittedly-unrealistic competition link is certainly going to bring
in some fresh blood.

Throw in a blog with regular Model Spotlights, a sort of take on the
chathost interviews which I've
failed to keep up, special competitions for tokens on days like New Year
and Valentine's, HTML support in Bio pages allowing for formatting and color,
and it is a very friendly place.

There are also restrictions now on how many tokens the viewer can buy
at a time, and this has put a limit on the big spenders. Also bad
for the best models as it means their big fans cannot give us much tips.

Update
07 Jun 2012:Like many sites Chaturbate how has a "Fan Club", each chathost or
broadcaster can turn on their fan club from their broadcast settings
page and choose how much it should cost to join. Notice it is
organized by tokens the host earn, which are normally 5 cents each.
So if host chooses the minimum then the viewer pays basically $6/month
and the model gets $2.5 or 41%. Given that this whole site is very
much for those looking for the free/cheap things I don't think there
will be many sales at the $31/month level which would earn the model $15
or 48%. I can't see any way to pay for fan club membership using
tokens which is a bit strange. So what to fan club members get?
A green username, and acess to all of the videos and pictures posted by
that broadcaster. And additional respect in the chatroom from your
fellow fans of course!

In order to be a model in Chaturbate, you have to first sign up as a
generic member as mentioned above. You then submit the age
verification and wait for their reply which is quite prompt for me
(within 24 hours).

To earn money on chaturbate you basically are working for tokens
which you can then cash in for money. Each token is worth $0.05 or
5 cents which means that your "percentage" is not as easily calculated
as other sites because cost to the viewer of a token is variable.
But it is at least about 50% so that's pretty good. Once you reach
the minimum payment of $50 and complete a claim form with address etc
details, you can choose to be paid via check or bank wire. Payments are
sent twice a month, about a week after each period ends. Update
28 Mar: Tokens are only work 3cents to chathosts from the
Philippines.

To start broadcasting, click on the "Broadcast Yourself". You
will start to see your actions being shown on the screen once your
webcam is talking to Chaturbate's software. However, it's not
really broadcasting yet. You have to click on the "Start
Broadcasting" button under the video to really start.

When viewers come in to your room the system will announce "horny345
joined" but unlike Freecamstars, it
will not tell you how much tokens this viewer has. You only know
he has tokens if he is blue while grey viewer has none.

Every time someone tips you, your chat window shows a yellow block:

I have seen a successful girl who her fans have decided to give her a
"yellow wall" by asking everybody flood the wall with yellow tips block!

Money earned does not automatically get sent to you. Rather
you have to go into Token Stats and use the token converter to turn tokens
into money. Tokens transferred on the 1st-15th of the month will be paid
by the 22nd. Tokens transferred on the 16th-31st will be paid by the 7th.

You have quite fine control over who can chat and who can view you.
For example:

or by countries or states in the U.S.

And if you really want to do something special to your big tipper and
don't want other viewers get to see, you can even set a password to view
your cam. This way, only your chosen viewer get to see you.

Ok so what is the down side, everything has problems right? Well
as with any site focused on competitions, points and tokens there is a very
tough barrier to getting into the top where all the money is for a new chathost.
Recently they also added an "Exhibitionist" category which does not
accept tips. Presumably hosts in that area are working just for
the prize money, but that seems a bit strange. This has annoyed a
lot of the models who are working for tips and caused them to leave.